One of Oskar Schindler’s greatest talents is understanding how to manipulate bureaucracy. Thomas Keneally describes him as “a great discoverer of unprocurables,” and this is partly because Schindler doesn’t always interact with bureaucrats the way the system intends. Schindler knows, for example, that some useful connections, a little bit of charm, and a well-placed bribe can get him just about anything he desires from the Nazis he interacts with—although not without some risk. Throughout Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally suggests that the German bureaucracy during WWII was both savagely efficient and bizarrely inefficient, using both humor and horror to demonstrate how the Nazis used a vast empire of paperwork to carry out their brutal extermination campaign.
The Nazi Party was organized as an enormous bureaucracy, and though at times this was inefficient, ultimately its bureaucratic organization was an asset to its brutal ideology. Keneally writes at one point about how the Nazi system hides its ruthlessness behind a “veil of bureaucratic decency.” This veil is important for several reasons: not only does it make the Nazis’ extermination of Jewish people and other minority groups more palatable to other nations (who then have less incentive to interfere)—it also works internally to help Germans in the SS and elsewhere maintain the belief that they were on the side of justice. Keeping this veil in place is one of the Nazi bureaucracy’s most important aims. Seemingly self-defeating policies, like the limit on summary executions (which might seem slow down the killing of Jewish prisoners by limiting the authority of men like the cruel camp commandant Amon Goeth) are actually essential to keeping their atrocities hidden and maintaining their power. Later on, near the end of the war, one of the main functions of the Nazi bureaucracy is to destroy evidence. Nazi Party leaders know that when the truth about concentration camps comes out, it will damage the war effort—as well as make many Nazi leaders vulnerable to retaliation or punishment after the war in the event of a surrender. Therefore, the Nazi bureaucracy helps coordinate the destruction of evidence—although paradoxically, it also leaves a paperwork trail that can be used to reconstruct events of the Holocaust. All in all, then, while the bureaucracy is at times comically inefficient and self-defeating, it’s also an important tool that the Nazis use to get away with their extermination campaign.
Schindler, however, understands that a bureaucracy is ultimately made up of individual people, and that by appealing personally to the right bureaucrats, he can manipulate the system to his own ends. Schindler’s multiple trips to prison (and his subsequent releases) are perhaps the greatest example of his command of bureaucratic processes. Despite strict policies about how prisoners are to be treated, Schindler is able to skirt regulations and get out of jail by appealing to people in positions of authority. Schindler realizes that the regulations put in place by bureaucracy only have power if people in authority choose to enforce the regulations—a major flaw of the system. At another point, Schindler’s prisoner Janek Dresner is accused of sabotage, facing a likely death sentence. Schindler, however, avoids a potential tragedy by expertly manipulating the bureaucracy. He insists on taking control of the trial himself, puts on just enough of a show for those in the audience like Commandant Liepold, and then breaks up the trial (seemingly on a whim) before Dresner can be sentenced. Schindler understands that, from a bureaucratic standpoint, the show of putting on a trial is much more important than the trial itself. Ultimately, then, bureaucracy plays a villainous role in Schindler’s List, but the issue isn’t black-and-white. As Schindler knows (and as Keneally depicts), a bureaucracy is made up of people—and despite the seeming power of bureaucratic regulations, at the end of the day, these people still have autonomy.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Bureaucracy ThemeTracker
Bureaucracy Quotes in Schindler’s List
Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings. “Special-duty groups” is a close translation. But the amorphous word Einsatz was also rich with a nuance-of challenge, of picking up a gauntlet, of knightliness. These squads were recruited from Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Wilhelm Keitel that “in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints.” In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.
Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.
Then, in the butt end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone—one of the Polish shipping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions section, you couldn’t tell—had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end.
The orders, labeled OKH (Army High Command), already sat on Oskar’s desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL Płaszów and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to Płaszów, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin.
This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity.
Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.
For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing.
To call either of them a speech, however, is to demean their effect. what Oskar was instinctively attempting was to adjust reality, to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty, he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith Liebgold among them, that they would last the war. He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their morning of arrival the previous November, and told them, “you’re safe now; you’re with me.” It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a demagogue of the style of Huey Long of Louisiana or John Lang of Australia, whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil devised by other men.
Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in German at night on the workshop floor to the assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand to attention. He looked around at the mute faces of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he thought. And then everything will fall apart.
